Rose Under Fire

They took a break in the lecture after a while, though we all kept on furiously producing limitless amounts of grey wool tubing (which of course we were never allowed to use ourselves, even when it was snowing). By the time they got to their recess, I was swaying on my feet. I couldn’t sit, but I couldn’t really stand yet either – not for the whole day. It was about 10 o’clock in the morning and I’d been up since 4.00.

‘So how come you’re French, if you don’t speak anything but English?’ Róża asked. ‘Are you another parachutist?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘There are a few English ladies here who were dropped into France by parachute, as spies. Are you a spy?’

‘Gosh – would I tell you if I was?’

She laughed. It was a real laugh this time, a bubbly giggle of a laugh, not the other bitter, ironic cackle. ‘You look French – bald. When Paris was liberated, they shaved all the French prisoners’ heads again as punishment. What are you then? And how did you end up here?’

‘Are your English ladies here now?’ I asked.

‘No, they’re not in this block. And even if they were, they’re not cripples. They have to do real work,’ Róża said offhandedly.

‘Are you all crippled?’ I asked, looking around the room. I wondered, Am I here because I’ve been crippled? No, I’d been given six hours to recover and now I was already on my feet. Apart from the Polish girls who’d come back inside to knit after the morning roll call, all the rest of the Block 32 prisoners were fine – none of the French or Russian women had anything wrong with them apart from being filthy dirty and covered with scabies and starving, and they’d all marched off on work details that morning. ‘What happened to you?’ I asked.

‘Why don’t you tell me what happened to you, since I asked first,’ Róża said seriously. ‘Because if we start talking about me, you won’t believe me, and we’ll argue. Tell me about 51498, the French Political Prisoner with no French.’

‘Pardonez-moi, mais je parle un peu de français,’ I said. Excuse me, I do speak a little French. More now than I did then, of course.

‘Moi aussi, plus bien que toi,’ she answered. ‘Me too, better than you. And I learned most of it here, in Lisette’s French class. You should never use vous, the formal “you”, to another prisoner – we’re comrades. Not even to Lisette, who’s older than my mother was. Are you sure you’re not a spy? How did you get to Ravensbrück speaking only English?’

‘I’m American. I’m a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary in England – we ferry aircraft for the Royal Air Force. I landed in the wrong place and they sent me here. I got registered with a transport of French prisoners and they counted me as French too.’

‘Hah! Too bad you can’t speak German or you could report the stupid bitch who signed you up as French. She’d get in trouble for sloppy record-keeping.’

‘Boy, I wish she would,’ I said with feeling.

Róża gleefully repeated my story in Polish so that it could be passed around the rest of the room, and once again everyone shot questions at me about the invasion and the Allied advance and how soon the war was likely to end. (The Polish prisoners were pretty good at English, it turned out; later I realised they carried out some of their lessons totally in English.) I told them about D-Day and how we handed out the strawberries to the soldiers, and my gosh, that was a hit.

‘How many did each soldier get?’

‘Did you eat any yourself?’

‘How big were they?’

‘What variety?’

We switched topics from politics to food and I described the way Felicyta had made the little squares of toast with jam on them after Celia’s funeral.

Someone burst out with an exclamation in an excited voice and everybody laughed.

‘They think we could do that too,’ Róża explained drily. ‘The next time somebody gets jam. Sometimes a food package makes it through without the goddamned SS stealing everything in it except the paper it was wrapped in.’

‘They took my paper,’ I said. ‘I had chocolate.’

‘Chocolate!’

They were off again.

‘Hey, why don’t you lie across the table here?’ Róża said suddenly. ‘Here by me. You can lean on your arms with your wrists over the edge so you can go on working. Pile the wool on the bench. Yeah, like that. Better?’

It was better. The women on the other side of the table had to squeeze up a little to make room for my legs, but they compromised by using them as a backrest.

‘Just be ready to get down in a hurry if one of the guards comes in. Code word this week is muffins.’ (I don’t really remember what the code word was that week. It was always food-based: ‘Oh, how I wish I had ten muffins for lunch!’ I know a lot of Polish words for food now.) ‘Listen to Maria – she can see the window.’

Lying flat on my stomach across the table with my not-very-advanced sock dangling over the edge next to Róża’s knee, I had a close-up view of her thin right leg with the row of holes gouged in her shin. I couldn’t see anybody else’s legs, because they were all sitting the right way around with their feet under the table, and everybody was packed very close together. The absolutely awful thing about the damage to Róża’s leg was that it was so obviously permanent – it had healed that way.

‘Have you made me a poem yet?’ she demanded.

‘No.’

‘No extra bread for you today.’

I said to Róża, ‘I’m not giving you a poem till you tell me what happened to everybody’s legs.’

She tapped her shin with one of her knitting needles. I didn’t dare to look, but I couldn’t help seeing out of my peripheral vision. She was poking the tip of the steel needle into one of the holes – just awful. Macabre and awful. Then she made a loud announcement in Polish. People turned interested heads in our direction. Nobody stopped working.

‘Everyone in my transport is condemned to death,’ she explained in English. ‘Special Transport. Condemned, all of us. They’ve executed dozens of us already. But some of us they didn’t kill right away, and since they plan for us all to end up dead anyway, they used us – tested us –’

She hesitated, not with emotion, but just because she couldn’t find the right words. I don’t think she could find the right words in English or Polish. She used words like ‘experiment’ and ‘trial’ and ‘medical’ and they came out of her mouth so laden with sarcasm and hatred that it sounded like she was telling a really bad joke.

‘They “operated” on seventy-four of us, all Polish, mostly students from my transport. My Special Transport. Like experimental rabbits. That’s why we still get called rabbits, króliki – Kaninchen in German. Actually, what we said was that we’re not rabbits – one of the first girls operated on yelled it at one of the doctors and he thought it was funny. And it stuck. So that’s what they did, they cut us up like rabbits. They’d slice your calf open and fill the wound with gangrene and then seal it up in plaster for two weeks. Or they’d cut pieces out of your muscles or your nerves. Or they’d cut a chunk of bone out of your leg and try to stick it in someone else’s leg. I am special – I got operated on five times! Because I am so young and healthy, get it? They said they wanted to learn how to treat “wounds in the field” – “the field” means the Eastern Front, which is where most of Germany’s wounded soldiers are – so they’d “simulate” war wounds on us. Make a hole like a gunshot wound and then see what happens to it if you put a dirty bandage on it in a trench and never change the dressing. Guess what happens?’

I swallowed but couldn’t answer. The iron needles seemed to waver in front of my face, as if I were looking at them through a sheet of old glass.

‘Look, I’ll show you what happens –’ She barked orders in Polish at the girls sitting on her left and on my right.

They never stopped knitting. They turned round on the bench – they had room to do it because Róża and I were on the table. They stuck their own legs out in front of me, turning and showing off their scars as if they were models at a fashion show.

I burst out, ‘I heard about you on the radio.’

Róża dropped a needle.

It clattered on the concrete floor and the girl next to her dived to pick it up. They chattered together in rapid excitement and then suddenly the whole room was buzzing again – really buzzing – and they were all focused on me.

‘You heard ? On the radio? On the BBC? What did they say? Does everyone know?’

Róża explained very quickly, ‘Some of us died of it, some of us have been executed, but most of us are still alive, and we have been fighting to get the story to spread outside the camp. We smuggled out letters addressed to the BBC and the Vatican and the Red Cross headquarters in Geneva. Now we are such an embarrassment to the camp administration that they don’t know what to do with us – we’re all still condemned to be killed, but they’re scared to do it. They know we’ve been telling people, they know it’s leaking out – we got a blessing sent to us by the Pope! A civilian worker in Siemens will hear, or someone from the men’s camp, or a prisoner who knows about us will get released or transferred to another camp. It’s getting out. Some day, the bastards will have to account for what they did to us. What did you hear?’

‘I don’t know who it was. The report was about an American woman who’d been in a prison camp in Germany – she had a list of names.’

‘It was Aka! She does have American citizenship! It was us! See, it’s working! What did you do when you heard? What did you think? What did people say?’

I hesitated. They were so excited, and my answer was going to be so disappointing.

‘We didn’t do anything,’ I said. ‘We just thought it was anti-German propaganda. No one believed it.’

‘No goddamn extra bread for you ever,’ Róża snarled with venomous resentment.

Instead of snapping back at her I sang softly,

‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,

Will I ever see thee wed?’

‘You bitch,’ she murmured, just as soft.

‘It’s a round. It’s easy. I’ll teach you.’

‘Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose,

Will I ever see thee wed –’

Suddenly the girl on my right sang the first line back to me – Rose, Rose, Rose, Rose. She even picked up the unfamiliar English words of the second line, Will I ever see thee wed –

‘I will marry at thy will, sir,

At thy will.’

When I started to sing it a third time, a voice across the table joined in too.

It didn’t take them long. It is an easy round. They were practised and fast at learning things by heart, and starved of beauty.